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two of the three remaining hostages were killed and they were shot by friendly fire that was the first time that i'd worked anything where people had gotten killed former fbi kidnapping negotiator best-selling co-author of the founder and principal of the black swan group i'm chris voss how important is it generally in negotiations to listen whether it's business or law enforcement if i take the time to to really hear somebody out in our first deal then every deal after that will come to me faster it's critical i'm so compelled to ask you like what is the cost that we don't get to see of your job you know you get you get really wrapped up in your work and i think you tend to become distant in your personal life the closer you are to someone sometimes you just it's really harder for you to see things from their perspective the truth sometimes is a knife to the heart right like you go through a traumatic event are you traumatized by it then never recover or is there post-traumatic stress growth where you took that and decided to be better than you ever were before because you never want to let that happen again so without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the direva ceo usa edition i hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this yourself [Music] chris you've lived a extraordinary life for many many reasons which i'm sure we're going to go into but um i guess my first question is what do i need to know about your upbringing your early years if i am to understand the man you are today i think really that my father just required that that we work hard and then we figure stuff out like my father was an entrepreneur and then no matter how old you are even i started working for him probably when i was about 11 but the downside of working for a guy that would never ask you to do anything he wouldn't do himself
if there is anything that he wouldn't do himself just because it needed to be done then like you get asked to figure out some crazy stuff like you know a middle-class entrepreneur you know blue collar you know guy and i remember i think it was about 11. he decided he wanted a new garage in the backyard and we had to get rid of the old garage and you know he handed me and my 13 year old sister crowbars and said go out and tear down the old garage he just kind of you know he's got to figure stuff out and so i really grew up in an environment of working really hard it he never preached this ethics but we were you know very ethical you know honest hard working and figure stuff out which is if that's your attitude there isn't that much you can't do and that was kind of drilled into me at an early age figured out work hard be honest so if i hit fast forward on your on your life from that point and i go into your days and the the swat team for the fbi right how long were you working in the swat team with the fbi uh i was i was technically a member of the swat team for about a year and then you know i was in on a pittsburgh fbi it was on that swat team and then i got transferred to new york and i decided to try out for the fbi's equivalent of the navy seals the fbi's hostage rescue team and so i tried out for that team and i re-injured my knee so i wasn't i never technically made that team nor when i was in new york was i on the new york swat team but i had been on the swat team in pittsburgh for about a year you ended uni during training yeah you know it was originally uh toured up originally in college and my view is you know the worst things that have happened to me i've always led the better stuff i would never become a hostage negotiator if i hadn't torn on my knee and so you know then when i was trying out for the hostage rescue team then i re-injured it
and uh i went went to a doctor to have it rebuilt for a second time [Music] and at that point in time i thought well i don't know how many times they could put humpty dumpty back together so i love crisis response because you got to make a decision i've been very much a decision-oriented guy you know president kennedy talks about the dangers of comfortable inaction i've always hated that so you know i wanted to stay involved in crisis response we had hostage negotiators my son and i like to joke that one of the voss family models is how hard can it be and i remember thinking how could it be you know they talk talk to terrorists i talk every day i can talk to a terrorist when you um when you injured your knee and you you're thinking about what to do with your life i i read that you had a chat with a lady um about options and she basically rejected you and said yeah said go away who is she uh she was the head of the hostage negotiation team for fbi new york she was on uh one of the terrorism squads close to mine and i knew she was in charge of the program and you know i thought you know the willingness to learn was adequate and so you know i sought her out to express my interest and kind of presented myself like ta-da here i am i'm wonderful look at me i'm willing to learn and she was just like go away everybody wants to do this it sounds cool everybody wants a t-shirt she asked me about you know any previous experience or credentials i had i didn't have any one after another i was like nope nope no education no background no experience no no that's none of this none of this and finally she just said like no you can't do it stop bothering me it was like got to be something i could do you know
i've always kind of been proactive i didn't know i was there's a theory that i uh principal that we operate on now which is never ask advice from somebody wouldn't trade places with or never take direction from somebody who hasn't been where you're going i just thought it made sense to go to the right person and ask which is kind of how i got in the fb in the first place and i said there's got to be something i could do what is it she said you know what there is go volunteer on a suicide hotline but until you've done that don't bother me and it just seemed really obvious to me okay you know this is somebody who knows i'll do it and that's how i got in the fbi really and so i went and did it and i went back to and i said you know i i've been volunteering a suicide hotline for the last five months and she's like what she was shocked she said i tell everybody to to do that nobody ever does it when i went back to her said i'm including the story in the book she said you know i told over a thousand people over the course of my career to volunteer on a hotline and only two people did it and you were one of them and i thought that's just that's so obvious what was that like that suicide hotline you five months you did that i actually volunteered there for a total of three years and then i got involved in the board and the funding and the operation and i taught there too because i was so into it it was so valuable um i went there to learn a skill and i ended up learning a skill and serving the community which then was very no better secondary bonus than to do something that benefits you and have it benefit everybody else too difficult man uh well if you take the training you're willing to learn the training was phenomenal and i went there to learn so i soaked it up like a sponge emotionally difficult uh
it can be depend upon how vulnerable you make yourself now since and what i used to tell the volunteers there because uh crisis hotline suicide hotline the biggest problem is volunteer burnout it is difficult emotionally if you go there to help and you want so much to help and there's a lot of people that make it extremely difficult to help them and that can be emotionally draining now i went there to learn versus help and the help was a secondary benefit so the really difficult types we used to call them frequent callers they didn't suck the life out of me they fascinated me like this is crazy i gotta learn how to communicate with these people these are no different than the people that are very difficult in business negotiation because how you do something is how you do everything way back when i learned this thing called the drama triangle which was kind of three arc archetypes of difficult people and we're seeing that show up exactly in business negotiations so human behavior is human behavior period what is that triad well um the way i learned it way back then was you know there's there's um uh the victim uh the protector and the persecutor and someone who comes on a hotline really portraying themselves as a victim they're trying to draw you into being the protector or to give advice you know i'm i'm i i need your advice might be what they would literally say and then if you're dumb enough to give advice then they switch from being the victim to the persecutor and they attack you for your advice and then as soon as you back off then they go back to being a victim again to try to lure you into giving them advice so that they can attack your advice and so what they told us you know the earmarks of watch out for somebody trying to lure you into giving advice versus being a great sounding board helping them
discover the answer on their own and then in 2002 much later i run across jim camp's book start with no and he talked about effectiveness in business negotiation helping your counterpart discover the best answer because if they discover something mutually beneficial versus if you offer it if they discover it it's their idea and they're going to do it if you offer it you're giving them advice and they got no emotional ownership and they're less likely to do it so he called it helping them discover the best deal and back in the on the hotline days it was just guided discovery helping them discover the best outcome from those three years volunteering at the suicide prevention line was there anything else that you really learned about the nature of human beings um that has stayed with you still to this day in business and and your days as an fbi negotiator yeah well you know still still still actually going back and and pulling the lessons out of it um and it's you know people are uh their thoughts are most dominated by loss um what are they worried about losing what's their vision of loss over the future daniel kahneman won the nobel prize in 2002 behavioral um uh prospect theory uh economic nobel prize on human behavior which is lost looms larger than gain some people are putting it at a two to one ratio nobody ever puts it less than two to one lost things twice as much as a as an equivalent game i've heard people talk about be as much as nine to one which is why researchers are having trouble putting an exact number on it so sometimes somewhere between two and nine times loss your vision of the loss is going to determine your behavior and that was really and we taught on a hotline and taught in uh hostage negotiation look for the loss
somebody's taken hostages they've suffered a personal identity identity law somewhere along the line and there's probably a triggering event in the last 24 to 48 hours but look for the loss and then kahneman comes across in 2002 danny kahneman and amos taversky taversky had died by the time they awarded the nobel uh prize which is why he didn't get it along with kahneman because they're not giving it after somebody's died saying that no this is just human behavior period period not just hostages not just people in crisis but it's the single dominating influence of all human decision making not the only influence just the biggest and so learning how to cope with that on the hotline is exactly what we're doing these days in all our interactions is there a way to like leverage that to your favor when you're negotiating with someone you can you have to be really careful with it which is really the whole reason to being use empathy as an approach because if you don't use empathy um then you're the hostage taker are you trying to use leverage against them i mean it's it's such a blunt force trauma concept that if if you don't do it gently uh with empathy versus sympathy you know empathy is is not the same as sympathy but you're going to seem like a hostage taker yourself if you start out by saying like look man i know you got a lot to lose if you don't make this deal well that's trying to trigger loss but you yeah i seem like a hostage taker myself if i do that so i gotta work my way into a position where i gotta get you to realize that that's the case quick one we bring in eight people a month to watch these conversations live here in the studio when we're here in the uk and when we're in la if you want to be one of those people all you've got
to do is hit subscribe when you became a hostage negotiator when was your first real job yeah it was a chase manhattan bank robbery bank robbery yeah with hostages which although it happens all you know in the movies all the time you know bruce willis samuel jackson kevin spacey eddie murphy they're negotiating the hostages out of banks and every movie about it in real life it's a really rare event like it was a bank robbery with hostages in new york city and there hadn't been a bank robbery with hostages in new york city for over 20 years now people get taken hostage in bank robberies but generally the bad guys are gone before the police show up because they know if the police get to play surrounded their chances of getting away are lou so they're gonna be gone but to trap bank robbers in a bank with hostages really really rare and that happened about a year and a half after i got out of the negotiation training and i was still volunteering on suicide hotline so my skills you know you fall to your highest level of preparation i was ready i was ready to go when they put me on the phone because i'd been negotiations of perishable skill and i'd been working at it my skill level was really high at the time are you nervous when you get that phone call about that bank robbery i know i was ready to go i mean i was doing it because i wanted to i would want to get involved i wasn't doing it to get the t-shirt you know i was doing it because i wanted to get involved and as a matter of fact like i was never asked to go a friend of mine had taught me and having made a mistake previously i had learned the lesson of just show up if something's going down show up um i heard this advice from a government official not that long ago and he said run to trouble always run to trouble
there's a whole bunch of reasons for that whether it's business or law enforcement one of the nice things about run into trouble running into you know figuratively theoretically running into the burning house you don't get criticized as much you know you run the trouble if you're running into a static situation or something a bunch of people have been dealing with for a while and it's just been sitting there in deadlock and whatever you do people are going to criticize you you know because they failed and you're doing something different then they don't want to see you succeed but if if you're running that you run into chaos you run into trouble you know the criticism is much lower you know but he's dealing with it somebody's got to do something decisions have to be made it's a great strategy run the trouble and and i had and i'd come to uh to like that a lot so i'm sitting at my desk in new york my buddy charlie walks up and says there's a bank robbery with hostages in brooklyn let's go i looked at a police detective colleague because i had an interview scheduled that morning i said can you cover the interview he says yeah i got it and we go head to the bank and we show up and a team forms fbi and nypd both show up because it's a bank we know the pd negotiators really well our commander hugh mcgowan super sharp guy knew what he was doing he integrated the team first negotiator on the phone was a pd detective he points to me says you're the coach we stood up the rest of the team around joe the original negotiator joe talks the situation into stalemate which is not a bad thing because the threat level's not coming up and uh lieutenant mcgowan looks at me and he says okay you're up and they handed me the phone and what was your job at that point what was the the the bank robber asking for and what was your job at your objective well we didn't know it at the time like
the bank robbery was actually the classic great ceo negotiator like the great ceo negotiator is going to act helpless at the table because he doesn't want you to force him into a commitment you know i found this out some years later when i was learning negotiation at harvard you know they called a business strategy blame somebody who ain't in the room so great ceo negotiator is going to be like look man i got a board of directors like i got to be careful what i commit to here because this board of directors i i you know i do the wrong thing these guys got to fire me you know they're going to throw me right out of this company and and if the guy does that he's got all the power in the world he don't care about his board of directors he just doesn't want to get backed into a corner so the bank robbery we get on the phone with this guy the the the guy who orchestrated the whole thing and he's like man i'm scared of these guys in here these other these other guys that i'm with man they are dangerous like i'm scared of them they might hurt me so i gotta be careful what i say to you oh here they come now and i gotta hang up the phone and he was he was making it all up you know initially our initial assessment is this guy's an inadequate personality he's scared to make a decision complete smoke screen on his part so we're you know we're when we're in the in the negotiation for several hours and we got the banks surrounded and then the investigators on the outside and this is a residential commercial area of brooklyn so there are cars everywhere and they identify the owner of every vehicle on the outside and talk to them except there's one van out there and it belongs to this guy and as it turns out this guy is running a cash courier business that services this bank and they can't find this guy he is nowhere to be found so they go to his address and they say hey do you know this guy
and will you come to the scene of the bank and listen to the voice because we're running the negotiations on speaker outside to the commanders and the witness comes in and says yeah that's that's this guy's name happened to be chris also so they voice id this guy and he has never given us his name this is another great technique if we meet and i don't give you my name [Music] it unsettles you you don't feel you've connected with me and this guy would not give us his name so you know we're we got a voice id on him when a lieutenant says you're up next he says i want you to confront this guy about his name as quick as you can and we're not going to do a normal smooth hand-off you're just going to start talking normally the protocol is if you hand off from one negotiator to another the second guy comes on he says look i've been here the whole time and i've heard of everything that's going on and here's everything that i've heard because you don't need the other guy on the other side saying like where do i start with this guy you know have you been here listening do you have any idea what's going on it's a smooth transition but a lieutenant his gut instinct is like yeah we're not gonna do this this guy's a manipulative guy and in a really subtle way we're going to start taking back control and we're going to start by not doing a smooth transition so i get on the phone i'm talking to this guy now this is a kg dude we shift with no intro so what does he do in order to remind us that he's got hostages but also not raise the threat level because he's got to genuinely be concerned that the snipers are going to put a red dot on his forehead and the next thing is going to happen is he's going to be at the pearly gates explaining his actions over the last 24 hours he goes and gets a hostage and puts her on the phone we haven't we've been there five hours
we had no confirmation of the condition of the hostages other than him saying i'm taking care of the girls everything's fine as a matter of fact i gotta hang up the phone cause they're hungry and they want to get something deep all kinds of smoke screens so i'm on a phone and i hear this female voice come on go like i'm okay i'm okay and i'm like uh who's this what's your name i'm okay and then that's the last i heard of her he comes back on the phone pretends like this didn't even happen i'm like all right this is a cagey dude we're gonna go forward i'm gonna find a way to hit him with his name but do it gently so i start talking about his van outside which he knows is out there he just doesn't know that we've identified it and i said you know we got a van out here and we found the owners of every van and spoken to him except one and he goes we have more than one van now i got no idea what this guy is talking about so i did what we refer to as a mirror i just repeat the words because my brain is like what is this guy talking about i go you have more than one van he goes no we only have one van i go you you you only have one van and he goes yeah yeah and and you chase my driver away i go would chase your drive away he says yeah when he saw the police he cut and run now this super control freak guy is now blurting stuff out as a result of my mirror my technique that he did not mean to say this ends up convicting his getaway driver who had gotten away and we didn't even know there was a third guy how did that case end everybody came out why why did the bank robber concede in the end did he get anything he wanted well the uh not and you know and you know how do you negotiate when you're not going to give them anything you know you help them see a different
vision of the future is what it really boils down to and what you really want them to see is a vision of future where they live and then you're hoping the survival instinct kicks in and when the second guy got on the phone with me his principal concern was getting killed right and his secondary concern was uh being handled roughly when he came out of course he knew that they had beaten the women on the inside and that may contribute to his being handled roughly when he came out but he number one didn't want to get killed and number two my opening line was look when you when you come out you'll be treated with dignity and respect and i said that to him enough times that he decided it was going to be true and uh he asked to meet me face to face out in front of the bank was he treated with dignity and respect a thousand you got to keep you got to keep your promises because and you know this was this was one of the things when i was teaching negotiation at harvard you know my academic brothers and sisters up there were like were like would you lie to get the guy out and my answer was no and they'd say like yeah but let's say let's pretend let's imagine that a terrorist has got a nuclear bomb in boston and you know that if you lie to him he won't set the bomb off so how do you answer that one and my answer is well number one the guy's probably testing me to see if i'll lie so i gotta watch out that it's not a trap number two if he's not testing me he's gonna be a better liar than i am and he's gonna sniff it out you can't lie to a liar you just can't they're too good at it and then number three even if i lied to him and get them out somebody's gonna find out that i lied
and i will always have the reputation of being a liar and i can't risk my reputation so if i'm uh if i'm a if i've got hostages and i call you and i say listen i want a car i think i saw this one on your youtube channel i want a car in 60 seconds outside right um would you what's the first thing you say to me you want to try yeah let's do it all right so i'm the you're the beggar i'm the bad guy okay chris i'm gonna blow this woman's head off if you don't give me a car in the next 60 seconds how am i supposed to do that not my problem you got 55 seconds all right so if i wanted to do it it's just it's madness out here it's chaos i mean this is ringling brothers barnum bailey circus is organized compared to the nonsense that's going on out there so even if i wanted to do it i can't do it in that time frame i'm sure you're the fbi you're the police you can make anything happen 50 seconds sounds me like you're not gonna give me a chance i'm giving you a chance right now 50 seconds chris there's plenty of cars up there go get one of the cars and pull it up outside or i'm going to blow her head off sounds like you have a reason to live i do have a reason to live that's none of your business i'm i'm i'm not trying to find out why i mean my first number one thing is to make sure that you live so get me a car and i will drive off honestly you've got 45 seconds i don't want to talk anymore if you're not gonna give me a chance how am i supposed to do it i'm giving you a chance 45 seconds that's plenty of a chance like to me even find get all the commanders together and get them to think about this which they're probably not going to do anyway i will go and talk to them about how am i supposed to find them all talk to them get them to think about it in 45 seconds okay how long do you need i know first of all i want you to
understand i don't think they're gonna do it well then i'm gonna blow my head off that would be your choice see now so the other thing too is hostage negotiators are successful 93 of the time which is one of the things that i learned in the business which means seven percent of time they just ain't coming up now i we have to do everything we could possibly do in the meantime but our number one goal is not putting any additional people at risk like i get this question all the time like if you think it's gonna save a hostage why don't you just give him a car and save those hostages well i can't put additional people at risk and by the way while we were doing that i don't know anybody put a clock on us but we went more than 45 seconds it's true and what were you thinking when as we were going through it um there was all the questions were provoking me into all the questions you asked me felt like they were dragging me away from my objective in a quite a tactical way so i was thinking oh he's not this is annoying he's making me talk and i don't want to talk that's kind of what i was thinking and then yeah i mean the questions you asked were making me ponder and they were making me abandon my focus which was to just get this car and kill this woman right see which was i wasn't asking you that stuff to get you to answer what i was really doing was doing exactly what you talked about get you to ponder get you to think you know what kahneman would has talked about in his book thinking fast and slow pondering he would call slow thinking in-depth thinking where you really think about stuff and then you really make the decision and you really make up your mind instead of me trying to hustle you
like i could hustle you into something really quick but it wouldn't be your decision and the whole point of getting somebody to ponder something is so that when they do come to a decision they own it when you said the thing about even if i wanted to do that like i couldn't do that in 45 seconds or whatever i liked that sentence because it obviously there was a degree of empathy there so even if i wanted to it wasn't you know on my parade it wasn't attacking me too much and you made me ponder the reality of the fact that it's not even possible my demand is not even possible even if you you know were on my side so that was a very good question to to make me ponder myself to realize that what i'm asking for is not going to happen seeing there's another reason why i said it like that too um because you know a lot of people if you ask for something in a business deal that they're not going to give you they give you a classic american lie i'll try you know and and maybe it's not an american line maybe it's a lie in english language like but you know in any kind of deal somebody looks at you and says i'll try [Music] you don't get a good feeling no and you get all trying enough times you know right away it ain't never happening yeah yeah so i didn't do i'll try you know i basically said i don't think it's gonna happen but i'll check because i'm trying to shift us out of an adversarial into a collaborative conversation and so then what i'm basically saying is like i don't want to mislead you i don't think this can happen i will be your advocate how important is that collaboration no relationship survives long term without collaboration just just ain't gonna happen so you're giving me the impression that you're actually on my side to some degree and that we're collaborating to find an outcome together
yeah and point of fact see the crazy thing is hostage negotiators have repeat customers if i get you out alive the chances of you straightening out your life are not great and the chances of you ending up in another hostage siege are high if you don't get killed otherwise and you got to have a memory of the last hostage negotiator trying to work with you versus the guy hustle jen lied to you guy or gal so if you always look at all interactions as if you're gonna have to pay for everything you said eventually which means if you lie you're gonna pay for it if you did every thing you could to be collaborative then your counterparts going to remember that in the future like well i didn't go my way but at least you got in line to me it's like comma isn't it it's karma a thousand percent is karma i'm a big believer in karma very much i had a few words to say about one of my sponsors on this podcast as the seasons have begun to change so has my diet and um right now i'm just going to be completely honest with you i'm starting to think a lot about slimming down a little bit because over the last couple of probably the last four or five months my diet has been pretty bad um and it started to show a little bit really over the last two months i go to the gym about 80 of the time so i track it with 10 of my friends in a whatsapp group and this tracker online that we all use together we call it fitness blockchain and i'm currently at 81 percent um so 81 of the days i've done a workout in the last 150 days right so i'm going to the gym about six times a week that's been a little bit impacted by the derivatio live tour but i'm trying to stick to it and so one of the things i'm doing now to reduce my calorie intake and trying to get back to being nutritionally complete and all i eat is i'm having the hule protein shake thank you for making a product that i actually like the salted caramel is my favorite i've got the banana one here which is the one my
girlfriend likes but for me salted caramel is the one how important is it generally in negotiations to listen because a lot of people you know kind of think they can overpower someone with right just talking at them right yeah and and what they're what they're called is um they can't hold a job yeah yeah you know you you and there are a lot of people that are very visible that are doing that and in the moment they might look very good but what ends up happening is they're frequently initially extremely successful and then their success rates drop off a cliff and then they don't hold the job because they were awesome in their first quarter and it had a continuing steady decline in their productivity until it went to zero and they they can't be tolerated anymore but everybody sees a really loud guy or gal getting deals or and and they're the ones that make the most noise about it so your original question is how as important as listening there is no negotiation methodology that doesn't list listening as an advanced skill no matter what school of thought somebody's in in negotiation they all list listening as advanced far more difficult than simply keeping quiet it's critical and you will actually end up increasing the velocity of your deal cycles by listening which a lot of people think it's really counter-intuitive but you know i did i did an interview with mark cuban six or seven months ago and i talked about listening and he's like yeah you know if i take the time to to really hear somebody out in our first deal and pay attention to what's important with them then every deal after that will come to
me faster having done it right up front and it'll increase the velocity of my ability to make deals with them because they'll trust me they'll know that i hear them out they know that i'm looking out for them and consequently you know it doesn't take me a long time to establish trust when we come back we come to the table we get right down to it and it really increases the velocity of my ability to make deals and a lot of people can't see that because i got to hear them out i gotta you know blah blah blah i gotta find out what their point of view is it seems highly efficient but what it is is incredibly efficient long term and then as it relates to speaking when you're talking when you were talking to me then in our little dummy negotiation um i noticed the tone of voice you took was very very calm you list in the book three different voices available to negotiators right give me a flavor of those three voices that are available to negotiators well there's there's there's three natural types um in humans five fly to make friends and these are the uh our caveman ancestors that lived either fought the saber-tooth tiger ran from the saber-tooth tiger or figured out a way to make friends with it and the indecisive caveman got eaten by the saber-tooth tiger doesn't have any descendants and we've got substantive reason to believe that that exists globally regardless of gender ethnicity um religion the three types the globe splitting pretty evenly into thirds got a lot of data on it backs it up our brothers and sisters at harvard pretty much agree based on their experience warden has pulled a lot of the same data comes very very close to the same and each type has a voice
you know and the voice of the assertive natural born assertive which i'm actually a natural-born assertive is more the donald trump style negotiator you know attacking blunt direct you know uh ivanka trump once described her her dad donald and said you know he's not blunt he's just direct well he's just an example but you know what i think is direct you feel like you got hit in the face with a brick which is always counterproductive long term always always always long-term counterproductive inhibits your ability to make deals people get tired of getting hit in the face with a brick so it wears them out then there's the very analytical type um which was you know that soothing calming voice that i was using triggers a neurochemical response in you it actually calms you down neurochemically it's a involuntary automatic response now you can fight it you can fight your way back out of it but you can't stop me from getting the calming neurochemicals started in your head and you know what if if you're careful not to seem either cold or condescending [Music] that tone of voice is what the great tv interviewers use the great news anchors because there's a lot of there's confidence and calm simultaneously and people really like it and then there's you know there's a smiling voice a friendly voice and somebody just smiles when they speak that triggers a different neurochemical reaction the people that you automatically like right away as soon as soon as you lay eyes on them as soon as they start speaking you know there's an advantage to that so i was using you know in an emotional situation and if you're in an emotional negotiation you know you want to go with the the soothing voice and smile sprinkle that in and now you kind of you get the combination of both of them and it's
it's collaboration you're going to want to collaborate with me if i use that voice i guess it's an attempt and as you say to like pacify pacify them the other thing that i in chapter three of your book you talk about is by the way you got a pretty good voice you got you got a you got you you're basically downward inflecting your voice portrays first of all it's very genuine but it portrays a guy who's actually really thinking about what he says and he actually listens oh that's very kind compliment thank you but she's still gonna die in chapter three you talk about um labeling their pain i found that a really interesting concept right don't feel their pain label it i think that's probably a mistake i've been making i actually was thinking about that in the context of like my romantic relationships right when my girlfriend is talking at me as a way to kind of create that bridge how do i create that bridge by acknowledging or labeling her pain can you explain to me what you mean by labeling their pain you know um think of what whatever the negative emotion that they're feeling is the elephant in the room so if i'm if i'm you know i'm holding someone hostage and i'm crying yeah yeah i'm gonna say it sounds like you feel like you're out of control it sounds like you you feel that you're gonna have to do something you really don't want to do and what does that do to me when you when you do that all right so and this is one of the few and the black swan method that's also backed up by neuroscience like we know anecdotally that this stuff works because we're proving it over and over again we're walking the talk we make our own deals very effectively and the people that we coach make their deals and accelerate their deals very
effectively so you know so we got no shortage of our own anecdotal information we don't really don't need the neuroscience but there's been several neuroscience experiments they put people in fmri's functional magnetic resonance imaging devices where they can watch the brain light up and they induce negative feelings in people and they watch the brain light up typically by showing them some sort of photograph that causes them to feel a negative emotion whether it's sadness anger whatever it is and then they simply ask the people to identify or label what they're feeling as a result of the what they saw [Music] and each and every time the person labeled it the the uh electrical activity in that part of the brain diminished every time not deny but just called it out you know you don't deny the elephants in a room you say there's an elephant a room and that makes people feel heard or seen or felt all of the all of the above right so you know whatever the emotional reaction to that is people feel seen heard felt understood and it's probably a combination of you know the emotional reaction and the neuroscience reaction is it diminishes the negative emotions every time now the degree the degree that it diminishes the emotions changes like i you know we call that a label and i may label the negative that that i hear and it might have a minimal impact a tiny little impact or might have a huge impact but the impact is the type of impact is the same every single time the degree of impact changes but the nature of the impact is always to diminish the negative emotion one of the things that i read as well that you're looking for in these negotiations is for
them to conf give you a confirmation like if they say that's right yeah so you're you're trying to get me to not blow this lady's head off and if you can get me to say that's right what is that a signal of that's right is what people say when they feel understood you pull that's right out of somebody you're on your way in in the direction of a great resolution no matter what the negotiation landlord tenant employee employer you know business deal pulling that's rights sends you in a great direction so you've labeled something that i'm feeling you said stephen it feels like you're about to do something you don't want to do and then i go that's right right now so so tall rise great researcher besides great author he speculates he says you know i think somebody says that's right when they even experienced an epiphany to some degree that's what you say when you when you what you think you've heard is completely true you're not agreeing with a person you're observing that what they said was true and when he said epiphany i'm like ah this is interesting let me look up the neuroscience of epiphanies and among the neural chemicals that you get ahead of in an epiphany is oxytocin which is the bonding drug so you get a hit of oxytocin based on what i've said and you have an involuntarily feeling of bonding towards me and then you know the neuroscientists that i think the world of andrew huberman i heard him talking about on oxytocin and he says that oxytocin tends to make people tell the truth so if you say that's right you're going to feel bonded to me and you're going to be more likely to tell me the truth that ain't a bad position for me to be in in a negotiation negotiations are you know all over our lives so i mean yeah when i was everywhere everywhere
right it's everything it's teams it's business it's podcasting it's my girlfriend whatever when i was reading through the the principles in your book never split the difference um so much of it i could relate to you from the context of like romantic relationships with my partner yep you must find yourself in your own romantic relationships deploying some of these skills and which ones of them which one in terms of whether it's just you know acknowledging them making them feel heard what are the key skills that translate really effectively to romantic relationships well they all do because every human being wants to be understood and in a romantic relationship they want to know that you understand you know and in many cases like any relationship they just need need that in and of itself now the additional demands of romantic relationship is they're gonna want you to understand and adjust which in point of fact what other relationship do they not want that from you as well not only show me you understand but then walk the talk it's um the closer you are to someone sometimes you just it's really harder for you to see things from their perspective like you think you didn't do anything wrong and you know and typically male female but not confined to this you thought you were fine when in fact what they perceived was that you were clumsy and insensitive are you good at negotiating in a romantic relationship because i can i'll ask her when well the problem with dating a really smart girl is she starts out negotiating you pretty quickly but the really that you know the real issue is what's your intent behind it like if you're hearing your romantic
partner out just to get him to shut up like the second or third time you pulled that on them they have figured it out and you're disingenuous but if you're hearing somebody out because you want things to be better you really want the relationship to be long-term and you want it to continue to get better then they're happy to let you hear them out or to be let you make them feel heard because you're going to make the adjustments and your behavior to take that into account and you're going to show that you care enough about how they feel not just what happened but how they feel about what happened which is a recipe for a great relationship romantic or not but as as should be it's even a higher standard for a romantic relationship because how can you be involved long-term if you don't care how the other person feels in your negotiation negotiating days was there an instance where it really didn't go the way you wanted it to go yeah and with 93 success rate means seven percent of time is going bad and that's just that's just the nature of the game is there one that stands out for you as being well every one of them does but then then the issue is do you learn like uh naseem nicholas taleb would call it post-traumatic stress growth like you go through a traumatic event um are you traumatized by it which and then damaged and never recover post-traumatic stress uh injury harm disorder or is there post-traumatic stress growth where you took that and decided to be better than you ever were before because you never want to let that happen again when i said when i say this what is the incident that comes to mind well the first one uh that people died in was the second case that i worked in the philippines the burnham's a barrel case and early on before we could even get our arms around like a situation that was moving really fast and the philippine
military was engaged and chasing the bad guys and a chase had been on for weeks um guaranteero was murdered uh by by the abu sayyaf about 21 days into that case they had already killed a number of filipinos prior to that and as they moved across the landscape and the oceanscape and island island south of philippines they would they would kill hostages and pick up new hostages because there were people in their way all the time so that was an ugly case from the beginning to the end in the end of it uh the two of the three remaining hostages were killed in a botched rescue attempt and they were shot by friendly fire philippine scout rangers inadvertently stumbled over the abu sayyaf encampment didn't realize it was one that had hostages and it just opened fire they recognized it as a terrorist encampment formed a skirmish line on the trees on the uphill side and just started pouring um rifle fire down into the camp uh and so that was that was the first time that i'd worked anything where people had gotten killed does that stay with you yeah it does it does and and i felt sorry for myself for a long time and it's not like i'm um i'm happy about it but for i'll never remember the moment that i got the call 5 30 in the morning i was in washington dc where i lived and a voice on the other end of the phone said i've got bad news martin is dead and it was just a few hours after martin burnham had been killed and deborah yap the filipino hostage been killed martin's wife gracia was wounded and lived and i i'll never forget that was the worst that to that point and since was the worst professional moment personal moment of my professional career and i used to say is the worst moment of my personal career until i was hearing another hostage negotiator talking about a siege
he was in when an infant had had died had been killed and i remember sitting there watching him talk about it and he's still very definitely dealing with the scars and the wounds from having been the negotiator on scene and i remember him saying like you know i don't know why i keep telling you know giving these presentations maybe i just want people to know something bad that happened to me on a winter's day and i was sitting there thinking bad for you that wasn't your blood it wasn't your child and i thought you know we're taking on too much because it wasn't a member of our family it wasn't my brother wasn't my significant other it wasn't my son i got killed and that's when i tried to that's when i realized i had to put that stuff in perspective it wasn't doing anybody any good for me feeling sorry for myself i couldn't and and what we the changes we made as a result of the pronunciation saved lives you know that was that was our mandate all right so martin burnham is dead what do we do with that do we quit or do we get better if we get better somebody else is going to live and a whole bunch of people ended up living based on strategy adjustments we made as a result of that case it seems like a big a very significant sort of burden to carry right it goes back to what i said at the start you know it takes a certain type of person to want to be want to play with those stakes yeah somebody who's naive yeah you just don't know any better makes us difficult sometimes just thinking about you know the traumatic things we go through it makes us much difficult especially in forming relationships i was i struggled with that a lot struggled in having a girlfriend probably because my home life was so traumatic that i would always run from commitment but when
you've lived in such and you hear the same with like soldiers and stuff you know and you've lived through such sort of traumatic events and high stakes coming home to hey babe you're right can be difficult right yeah yeah it can be it can be it can be difficult you can you can have difficulty unwinding the other person depending on how you process information like the other person might genuinely doing their best to be there with you to get you to talk about it and you know if you if if that isn't the best way that you process it and yeah one of the very difficult things about me is i don't process stuff by talking about it i'll talk about it afterwards you know but i i kind of need i need to unplug you know i'll need a good night's sleep you know i'll need i'll need to let it run through the data banks and kind of bake on its own i'm probably pretty good the next day which is interesting because in your work you have no time for that yeah well you know and maybe that's why i need it more at home because in the work i mean we're gonna you know we're going on it right now we're dealing with it right now mirroring something you talk about as well in the book which i find really interesting because again something with my girlfriend i started to explore which was you know when she says something to me or when she does something i to make her again feel hurt i guess i just kind of repeat it back to her right also trying to is it also a body language thing or is it just how does mirroring mirroring work well the hostage negotiators mirror the black swans mirror you know the way that we teach in business now just all verbal okay you know if if you start lining up physically uh which is what the body language mirroring thing is like if you if you if that happens naturally then so be it enough people try to do it as a manipulative tool that we're really leery of
even coaching people on that at all like if we're talking and suddenly we both find us and i'm actually listening and you're listening we both find ourselves leaning the same direction that's cool because we're dialed in but the body language thing is is a tool of manipulation so many times of people that are just trying to exploit you that aspect of it we stay away from now the hostage negotiated mayor the black swan mirror repeating just the last one or three words of what somebody said or then taken surgically picking a gist one or three words here and there it's ridiculously effective ridiculously effective yeah you did very nice just and and the thing that i find fascinating about it too is like if we find somebody that's really into mirroring they'll typically be somebody who's iq and eq both are real high and there are a lot of people whose iq is real high you know their book smarts are good but the people smarts aren't good and they tend to love mirroring because it's the least amount of effort with the maximum amount of response and they want to guide and negotiation in a very gentle but purposeful way while the and the other side doesn't feel guided they feel like they're expanding and it's been real consistent when you think about your your next phase and your next your projects that you're working on now and what you're trying to do you've got your the blacks one group right i saw that online um the objective of that is to to coach people into negotiation skills and stuff like that yeah worldwide globally yeah and what does that look like is it a course that people can buy is it a webinar what is it yeah it's all of it the website is blackswanltd.com i mean if you just start now we got free stuff like how do you start to get better now if you're further on down the line we coach people through all kinds of deals on a regular basis and it's a really big part of what the company does we coach a
lot of people through negotiations and you've got your book as well which we've talked about a bit which is never split the difference which has sold more than two million copies worldwide which is just staggering crazy crazy numbers we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the previous guest leaves a question for the next guest oh and i get to i only get to see when i open the book okay oh good handwriting so this is useful okay is there someone in your life that really needs your help but you are still unsure on how to help them uh there's uh there's someone in in my immediate family that um i can uh i continue to buy the wrong gifts for and uh i've got actually a conversation scheduled for me to at least say all right i realize i'm getting it wrong help me get it right i think we can all relate to that in some respects well i can anyway thank you chris thank you for your time thank you for writing such a great book on a topic that is relevant to more than just fbi negotiations as you know it's relevant to my relationship with my partner to my business to everything in between it's really relevant to all the interactions i have with all humans and that's clearly a testament to why it's sold more than it's almost 2.5 million copies or something crazy like that i know that i know the stats around books i know that more i think my publisher told me that most books don't sell a thousand copies so like 90 plus percent of books don't sell a thousand copies just so to sell 2.5 million copies worldwide is staggering but it speaks to your experience and and the way you articulated it in the book it's been an honor to speak to you thanks for your wisdom and um i'm going to keep brushing up my negotiation skills pleasure's been mine thanks for having me on thanks chris i had a few words to say about one of my
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